


Ordinary (growing out of place)

by ShippingEverything



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Gen, Hair Braiding, Mother-Daughter Relationship, ZRS3 Spoilers, anyway hi im squid and all i do is project, veronica isnt canon black but she is in my head and thats fairly important to this fic so jsyk, why doesnt mrs mcshell have a name why doesnt veronica ever talk about her, zr answer for your fridging crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 07:57:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17977397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShippingEverything/pseuds/ShippingEverything
Summary: Veronica McShell is fourteen years old. Her braids are a year old. These two things aren't so much related as they are tangential.Or: on pain and hair care habits.***SEASON 3 SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY***





	Ordinary (growing out of place)

**Author's Note:**

> a veronica mcshell drabble for the soul  
> (and by the soul i mean myself)
> 
> one day i'll get my zr fics britpicked but today is Not that day, so sorry if there are any bizarre americanisms in this
> 
> title from DBMK's _Rot_

Veronica McShell has had braids since the apocalypse started. Her mom had done them about a week before Z-Day because she wanted Veronica’s hair to look nice for the Girl Guide camping trip, and Veronica had almost admitted to quitting the Guides in order to get out of it.

She didn’t, of course -- because she had liked having the freedom to go to the museum and see the researchers, to converse and learn from the Professor -- but she had wanted to. 

The braids in and of themselves weren’t the problem; she disliked the beads her mom insisted on putting on the ends because they made her look younger than her thirteen years, but the real issue was how much  _time_  they took. Nine hours, nearly half the day, lost to sitting in between her mom’s knees and staying completely still while her mom slowly created tight, thin, perfect braids out of her kinky-curly hair, even going as far as to undo an hour’s work just because some small section of the braiding was uneven or otherwise flawed.

Veronica had tried to convince her mom to just let  _Veronica_ deal with her own hair, but her mom had only laughed.

“When I can count on you to  _actually_ take care of your hair,” She’d said with a smile as she washed Veronica’s hair in the kitchen sink, “Rather than ignore it to go do an experiment with your dad, you can choose how I do your hair. Until then...”

She’d trailed off and Veronica was too busy trying to keep soap out of her eyes to argue back -- though, even if she  _had_  said something, Veronica doubts that her mom would’ve changed her mind; if there’s something that Veronica’s sure that she got from her mom, it’s her tenacity.

When Abel catches up with her -- Or, more accurately, when Abel and New Canton send people in who kill her best chance at understanding zombie immunity, almost destroy her calming plants, and keep talking about her  _dad_ like they weren’t  _responsible_ -

Anyway.

By the time Abel finds her, it's been sixteen months and nine days since Z-Days, which makes it about sixteen months and fourteen days since her hair was braided; by now, her roots aren’t just overlong, but outright messy. Even with her tight curl pattern, five inches of growth is not an insignificant addition, not to mention how the ends of nearly every braid have begun to come undone and how she only has five beads left, dirty and cracked as they are. Still, she hasn’t completely taken the braids out, despite the looks and comments the other treetop researchers had made. If anyone had outright asked her, she would probably say that she just hasn’t had the time to do it, or that it was a nonessential task that didn’t require her attention during the middle of the  _apocalypse_ , but in reality she doesn’t know  _why_  she can’t make herself undo them. Or, she does know why, she just can’t understand why it’s a problem for her.

Veronica McShell is not a sentimental person. She’s no good at it, or most emotional things, really. She owns exactly seven things, and five of them are clothing items. Before she got the note from her dad, she hadn’t even  _wanted_  to find any of her old stuff; if the old world was gone and they had to move forward, things from the past would only weigh them down. She knows that many people consider her coldness to be a character flaw, knows that people are off put by her intensity and devotion to science in a time when most people are still just crying about their lost love ones. However, she also knows that you can’t waste your time dwelling on the past; people that you should’ve said something different to, times that you could’ve done something better, good or bad choices that you made... it’s all gone and done with, and most of it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. It’s just not sustainable to put so much energy and emotion into things you can’t change. 

But she still thinks she hears her mom calling for her sometimes. She still walked around in a daze after spending over four days straight listening to and re-listening to her dad’s recordings, she still snaps at Sam Yao half the time he brings up her dad and talks about him like he was a  _superhero_ , like this is all a fun adventure RPG. 

Her hands still shake when whenever she tries to start taking out the braids

She knows that she’s being illogical and overemotional, that her dad is dead and her mom shares the same fate or a worse one. She never bought into religion, and recent events haven’t changed her mind, so it’s not like she thinks there’s some spiritual connection that exists between the three of them, especially not one that’s reliant on her  _hairstyle_ , but whenever she raises a hand to her braids, she...

Well.

Suffice to say, she leaves the braids, and glares at anyone who comments on them.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope u enjoyed this rambly mess. thanks so much for reading, drop a comment, kudos, or bookmark if you liked this!
> 
> [Main Tumblr (pldubrahs)](http://www.pldubrahs.tumblr.com) | [Writing Tumblr (nacreousglowclouds)](http://nacreousglowclouds.tumblr.com/) | [Personal Twitter (@squidias)](http://twitter.com/squidias)


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